Alexa toolbar is a no-no, Alexa toolbar serves no purpose, Alexa toolbar is spyware.

With so much negative feedback about the Alexa toolbar all over, why on earth would anyone want to install it on their browser? This is a question I pondered and why I installed it anyway.

There is no question to the fact that nobody wants spyware on their computer, those tiny little bits of script that follow and log your surfing habits like a P.I. investigating a cheating spouse, and these days that is something that is not hard to prevent with the multitude of programs available for combating just that.

A great one that I use is by safer-networking .org called Spybot Search and Destroy . It is available for free and has kept my computer absolutely spyware free.

The Good Side Of Spyware

There are a lot of quotes that I could use here but the one that comes to mind first is “every thing has a good side”
Case in point is the Alexa toolbar. Now why in the heck would I tell you that there is a good side to a toolbar that in fact we know is spyware? Read on, it will all come together.

As marketers, one of the rituals we constantly work on is traffic generation to our sites because more traffic of course as we know means potentiallty more sales, but it also increases the value of our sites traffic rankings that is very beneficial in the event you sell your site. A site with a high traffic rank is a definite plus when selling a site.

There are many ways that one can go about generating a better traffic ranking to our sites all of which are full topics of there own. In this post I would like to bring to your attention one way that I think many do not consider. The Alexa toolbar, yes a form of spyware, does though in fact have a big influence on how the search engines rank our sites because of the information it collects. That of course is traffic visiting your site.

Getting the benefits from Alexa

Every time someone with the Alexa toolbar on their browser visits your site, Alexa records that visit thus adding another traffic point/visit to your sites traffic rank. Of course now like with any system out there, the number are general and not absolute. But…Those numbers do have a bearing on how google ranks your site.

One concept that is important to understand is that Alexa’s rankings are calculated using a three month moving average. This means that Alexa calculates an average ranking over the previous three months.

Here are a few ways that you may want to utilize Alexa to help increase your traffic ratings and how google ranks you.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar and visit your sites.
If you don’t like the fact that Alexa also follows your other surfing habits install it on your secondary browser. Firefox is my main browser and I use IE 7 as my secondary.
(nothing against Internet Explorer but Firefox allows me to do so much more with my online marketing and research).

2.Have your friends and family use the toolbar and visit your site periodically.
Or here’s a thought, have everyone on your love link group use the toolbar when they visit your site(s) for some love linking, and of course you return the favor

3 Another way that you can benefit from Alexa is to use the Alexa widget on your site.
Installing the widget is pretty easy. All you have to do is go to the Alexa widget page, type in your URL and click ‘build widget’. Alexa will then give you the code that you can paste into your site.
The widget shows off your ranking and it also adds to your Alexa stats when people click on it.

Alexa…Spyware or ranking booster? Sometimes even a perceived bad guy ain’t so bad.